Set in stone: 'A nation of small town memorials'

This weekend war memorials across the nation will be the focus of Anzac remembrance services.

From tiny outback hamlets to the capital cities, the solemn strains of the Last Post will sound as wreaths are laid and heads bowed in contemplation of war time loss.

There are about 1,500 memorials to the First World War across the country - so many that Australia has been called a "nation of small town memorials".

Emeritus Professor of History Ken Inglis says the memorials are a profound reminder of an unnatural phenomenon.

"All our cemeteries, our civilian memorials to the dead, are put up by the young to mourn the old, but memorials, war memorials are put up to serve this unnatural purpose in which the old are left to mourn the young whom they've lost," Professor Inglis said.

But he also believes their real meaning has been partly obscured by the years.

"A new generation probably views them a different way, sometimes as a statement for people of the futility of war.

"That's not how they were erected in the first place. When new ones are built these days they tend to be devoted retrospectively to people who served in all wars."

Professor Inglis' interest dates back to the 1960s when he observed that many memorials to the Great War received little attention.

In researching Sacred Places - his award winning study of war memorials - he sought to explain why war memorials once stood so prominently in the Australian landscape.

He found a nation, already grieving for its momentous losses on the battlefields of Europe and the Middle East, also divided on how best to commemorate its dead.

"There was a great controversy or a great uncertainly after the Great War, about whether to make the war memorials traditionally monumental, stone or bronze, or whether to make useful objects like halls and hospitals," he said.

"So one faction said 'we don't want cold, dead stone' and the other said 'we don't want to insult the dead by making a war memorial out of something we were going to build for ourselves anyway, like a hall'."

"The one that everyone always remembers of course is the little digger on the pedestal," Mr Ekins said.

"Sometimes with arms reversed and head bowed, sometimes standing erect with his rifle by his side, but then they ranged through a whole variety often depending on the wealth of the district, to really quite elaborate and beautiful bronze statues.

"Sometimes very martial in their character, soldiers with bayonets fixed and charging, sometimes fairly poignant, rescuing a wounded mate and so on.

"So they run the whole gamut of those things, but as well as those there are very simple, common memorials and I suppose the simplest form is the simple little obelisk; a broken column on a pedestal with the names around the base - very poignant, simple little memorial and that's the most common feature."

Honouring the dead

Honouring the dead began while the war still raged and continued into the late 1930s.

By the time the last of the memorials had been dedicated, there was roughly one memorial for every 40 men who died.

Post war Australia was a nation in mourning; 60,000 dead from a nation of less than 5 million and about 100,000 returned men who bore physical or mental scars.

Grieving families and communities in Australia had to decide how best to publicly commemorate their loss and with no government help had to raise all their own funds.

"For a small town it wasn't a cheap enterprise to put this together and they had to get the expertise as well," Mr Ekins said.

"A lot of the little diggers that people have come to associate with the Australian soldier so strongly were actually made in Italy.

"They were almost mass produced by Italian stone masons and even Italian stone masons in this country."

Ken Inglis made another discovery; Australia was the only allied nation whose memorials recorded all the names of those who served, not just those killed.

He reasons it is because they were all volunteers.

Even New Zealand had conscription and like New Zealand, the memorials became substitute graves for loved ones whose bodies lay in far off battlefields.

"Most families couldn't afford to visit those graves so these became a substitute grave that they could visit, particularly on those important dates, like Anzac Day, our national day," Ashley Ekins said.

"But also on Remembrance Day, Armistice Day as it used to be, and perhaps even on the days if they knew the date of death of the loved one, perhaps on that day too.

"But they were a central part of every little country community, dotted right across Australia."

Other combatant nations such as France and America returned their bodies home.

There was a grass roots movement amongst returned diggers to bring home the body of an unknown soldier, a request denied because it ran counter to imperial government policy.

"Sixty thousand died and none of their remains were brought home until the Unknown Soldier, one single Australian was returned here in 1993, 75 years after the end of the war," Mr Ekins said.

Memorials and honour boards reveal a more obvious reality - the Great War's shocking toll.

"You'll often find men from the same family. That was one of the tragedies of the war that a man in a battalion could claim his younger brother, to join him in that same battalion," Mr Ekins said.

"And of course if that battalion came to grief in an incident, in an action, the likelihood was much higher that two might be killed or three as was often the case, and really it touched every single family in the land in one way of another."

Remembrance found expression in other ways.

"You've got things like avenues of trees - famously in Ballarat - the long avenue of trees, gardens, parks, gateways, conspicuous large gateways of memorials, so right through the country there are these different features," Mr Ekins said.

"Often for the Second World War they went for more practical things; parks and pools, gardens, but usually the custom was to attach the names to the old memorial.

"And it's always conspicuous that the number of those that died in the Second World War is markedly lower than the First World War."

There has been a resurgence of interest in memorials in recent years, but not all have survived the passage of years.

"Well the cold stone survived, nearly always and the halls didn't so people didn't know that they once had a war memorial," Professor Inglis said.

"I think there's a new recognition now and there's another generation who are more curious about how they came into being and what it was that drove them," Mr Ekins said.

"The conspicuous feature in all the little country towns will always remain those simple memorials that were erected after the First [World War]. It's a strange paradox, the further we go back in time the stronger the legend appears to become."

- Tim Lee's report Set in Stone screens on Landline this Sunday at 12:00pm AEST.